‘Get yourself dressed and packed immediately,’ said Mrs Hatch in a voice of matter-of-fact command. ‘You will leave the house within half an hour: before anyone else is up. Maghull is aready waiting with the car to take you to the station. When you have joined the train, he will drive to your Mother with a letter I have written her. She will have had time to read the letter carefully and, if necessary, repeatedly, before you arrive. I am sorry I cannot offer you breakfast, but the kitchen staff will not be down before you go. Hurry: or you will have to leave as you are.’
She walked away.
It never occurred to Griselda not to do what Mrs Hatch had ordered. She shut the door, turned on the light, and groped into her garments. Shaking all over, she packed. She packed Louise’s letter. She noticed Louise’s glasses, still on the bedside table. She wondered what had become of the little knife, and even perfunctorily searched for it. It was missing. Griselda recollected that she did not even known upon whom it had inflicted hurt. Whether the knife was meant to revenge or to rescue, remained unkown.
When, carrying her suitcase, she descended the familiar staircase to the hall, she saw that the front door stood open, the car waited outside, and that discoloured daylight was creeping into and around the house like mist. There was no sign of Mrs Hatch, or of anyone else other than Maghull on his box; but upon the hall table the large ledger lay open, the final balance, reached at no one could tell what small hour, ruled off and repeatedly underlined in gay scarlet ink. Entering the lavish vehicle, Griselda noticed that Maghull’s left hand was largely concealed by a newly tied bandage.
In the car Griselda wondered whether it would help Louise if she were to go to the Police. But she was not even sure whether her love for Louise might not be taken as an offence against the law. Griselda, in fact, felt at the moment too scared and ill to do anything effective. She began to weep, her tears spreading across the soft blue upholstery. She had to be assisted by Maghull into the railway compartment. He had the grip of a fanatic. No one asked to inspect the return half of her ticket.
It was only in the train that she clearly realized, in a series of horrifying shocks of perception, that neither she nor Louise had any means whatever of making contact with the other. Later it occurred to her that much trouble might have been saved, indeed two hearts from breaking and two lives from ruin, had either she or Louise thought to lock the bedroom door.
Part Two
XIV
But it was useless to continue weeping after the train had passed Clapham Junction. Not only was the compartment now filled with early wage-earners, looking pugnacious and embittered at their unjust destinies (one of them, a middle-aged woman, shapeless and sagging with repeated mismanaged maternity, stood for much of the journey upon the toe of one of Griselda’s shoes); but it had become clear to Griselda that a broken heart does not annihilate routine necessities, but merely makes them considerably more difficult to contend with.
Griselda’s Mother being the woman she was, it was now out of the question to return home, especially considering the trouble which had attended Griselda’s last year at school. This circumstance gave Griselda a marked feeling of relief. It was no comfort at all for having lost Louise that she was also rid of her Mother; but her new freedom from her Mother comforted her for much else. As the train passed Queen’s Road station, Griselda disentangled her left arm, opened the purse in her handbag, and was surprised to count three pounds, fourteen shillings, and sevenpence. Her Mother had made provision for her to tip: and she had not tipped. She had not even tipped Maghull. On the other hand, the clothes in her suitcase were appallingly inadequate as equipment for life: that is to say for what her Mother’s brother, Uncle Bear (his first name was Pelham, but he had never lived down a hit he once made in a school play), for what Uncle Bear termed ‘real life.’ On the other hand again, it was spring, and summer stretched ahead, warm and endless.
By the time the train had passed Vauxhall and had settled down for the wait common to all trains entering Waterloo, a brief spell enabling the traveller the better to meet the massed claims of the terminus. Griselda had resolved firstly to seek out the Great Exhibition Hotel and secondly to seek out Lord Roller. The Great Exhibition Hotel had been strongly recommended to her by a schoolfriend who had the habit of spending odd nights in Town. Lord Roller had offered employment.
At the other side of the compartment, four labourers, their clothes smeared with yesterday’s earth, were playing a simple form of nap, easing the run of the cards with monosyllabic obscenities. The train jerked into motion: as it racketed across the barricade of points, every second, it seemed, about to be derailed, the regular passengers rose to their feet and pressed towards the doors, hypnotized by routine into an appearance of striving to meet life halfway. Before the train had stopped, they were leaping on to the platform and running towards the sliding iron gates. The ticket collector had difficulty in controlling them. Until one looked again at their faces, it was for all the world as if they had an incentive in their existences.
Griselda, to whom the morning rush hour was a new experience, remained seated for a moment, fighting back the instinct to run with the herd. Then she drew down her suitcase from the rack and stepped from the train to find the platform deserted, and the ticket collector, a few seconds ago flustered and perspiring under the stampede, now irate and resentful of her dilatoriness.
‘Come along there. You’ll be late for work.’
Having delivered up her ticket, Griselda sent her Mother a telegram from the station telegraph office.
‘Taking job in London please don’t worry get better quickly much love Griselda.’
It seemed to be in the tradition of messages sent on these occasions, though it was Griselda’s first of the kind.
She knew her Underground, and proceeded to South Kensington, changing at Charing Cross. Each train was again abominably crowded; and the only excuse for a crowd, collective conviviality, conspicuously absent. At every station men and women fought in the doors and on the platforms. Between stations they joyessly read newspapers. The whole grim business was utterly orderly.
The Great Exhibition Hotel proved larger than Griselda had expected, and distinctly more pretentious. She booked a room for a week, thereby (after some firm bargaining) incurring a liability of three pounds ten shillings, supposing she passed seven days without eating. A porter in his shirtsleeves took her in a tiny, slow lift to the fifth floor and to 79A.
‘They knocked 79 in half,’ he explained, hanging about for recognition. Griselda gave him sixpence: which he regarded with a look which meant that women were all the same. The process of adaptation had proved fatal to the proportions; but the room was not exactly dirty, but offered a good view in the direction of Earl’s, possibly even Baron’s Court, the busy Inner Circle railway being in the foreground. The furniture was bright yellow but capacious. The bed bore a far-flung counterpane, hand-wrought in patterns of sheep-coloured wool, entirely different on the two faces. It was unbelievably heavy, the labour, obviously of years; superfluous labour Griselda thought. Beneath it was a flat and slithery eiderdown, covered in livid patchwork; and no fewer than four good blankets, tightly wrapped in on each side. Griselda deduced that many elderly ladies spent the evening of their days looking out towards the ghosts of old Earl’s Court and its Great Wheel from the casements of the Great Exhibition Hoteclass="underline" possibly, as they gazed, they matted coverlets heavy as lead sheeting, sewed gaudy scrap to gaudy scrap.